Up a gravel road running behind the Nelson’s Chapel church in Lenoir, North Carolina, sits a small cemetery. For about 50 years, one of the stones, marking the grave of twenty-five-year-old Lawrence Nelson, had a remarkable inscription beneath his name: “Murdered and robbed by Hamp Kendall and John Vickers, Sept. 25, 1906.” It’s not every day that a tombstone accuses people of murder. Hamp Kendall and John Vickers had initially been imprisoned for Nelson’s killing—but it turns out both men were proven innocent. After their 1907 convictions, a fight followed…
